Process Management and Improvement
Measure? If you can’t predict you can’t manage
Monday, August 16th, 2010Imagine Pacioli took a different tack.
You remember Pacioli. Italian guy. A friar. Invented modern accounting five centuries ago, give or take a few years. Ring a bell?
We still keep the books the Pacioli way. It’s why, when you buy a computer, you credit cash and debit tangible assets but when you train an employee you [...]
Managing to the numbers
Monday, August 9th, 2010The problem with managing to the numbers is that it doesn’t work. Far too many of those who think having an equity stake in a business qualifies them to run it, is that they think it does.
They are, in a word, naïfs, and in another word, arrogant. Bad combination.
Understanding that the plural of anecdote isn’t [...]
Apples and whoozits?
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Apple’s profit line has beaten Microsoft’s profit line.
It’s an occasion whose importance rivals one of a bygone era: The day the “Whopper beat the Big Mac,” back when the burger wars were upon us.
Comparing very much of anything having to do with Apple to anything having to do with Microsoft is about as sensible as [...]
Preventing strongly held opinions
Monday, June 28th, 2010Today’s KJR is “Based on a True Story.”
Which, if I worked in the movie industry, would mean it’s a work of complete fiction. Congress should form a regulatory agency to evaluate all claims of true-story-ness. It could provide a rating system, ranging from VA-90 (Verified 90+% accurate) to AP-10 (the names of fewer than 10% [...]
Business Relationship Management
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010It appeared in Forbes, it was about how to run IT better, and it was fatuously patronizing.
For a change of pace, it didn’t come from superficially informed business pundits who assume their general-purpose insights qualify them to offer up brilliant ideas for us we’d otherwise never have thought of.
The article (called to my attention by [...]
Unstructured data design – the missing methodology
Monday, May 17th, 2010Microsoft has just announced Office 2010. Surprisingly enough, it has genuinely interesting new features, most of them revolving around SharePoint and support for collaboration.
And, of course, The Cloud, where to Microsoft’s credit, alone among major software vendors its product makes serious use of the PC’s processing power instead of limiting its role to running a [...]
The case for decentralized control
Monday, April 26th, 2010Douglas Adams put five books into his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. KJR being a less ambitious undertaking, this will be the last installment in the Keep the Joint Running Centralization/Decentralization Trilogy.
And while Arthur Dent was endangered by the Vogons … the most dangerous bureaucrats in a multidimensional universe … we’re merely trying to [...]
In defense of specialists
Monday, March 1st, 2010Four words to eliminate from your vocabulary are good, bad, right, and wrong.
No, I’m not promoting rampant immorality, abandonment of your ethical code, or abolishment of truth, righteousness, and the American way.
What I want people to do is to avoid using these as categories, into which they file ideas so that later on they know [...]
Bob Lewis is president of 